Christ and the Judgement of God

Two other clarifications about God's wrath may be made. Wrath is not a permanent attribute of God. For whereas love and holiness are part of his essential nature, wrath is contingent upon human sin: if there were no sin there would be no wrath. Nor is the warning of wrath intended to be God's final word. In the structure of Romans, the exposition of wrath (specifically 1:18-32, and in a wider sense 1:18-3:20) follows immediately the announcement of the gospel of justification through faith (1:16-17). It explains why this gospel is necessary, but the gospel itself offers the invitation of deliverance from wrath.

Paul is concerned about the general direction of a person's life rather than about the individual acts which give evidence of that direction.

Sin is not merely an act which contravenes God's will, but is a whole attitude towards God

So it looks not back to its sins, but forward, 'listening to the promise of grace'. It is the radical nature of conversion, not the assumption of ethical perfection, that causes the absence of confession of sin in Paul's allusions to worship. And what is true of the worship service is true as a general principle of Pauline Christianity. Paul does not reflect on sin in his own life. This is not because he regards himself as sinless, but because he looks forward to his goal and upwards to God rather than back to his sins.

Wrath of God But where he does give indications of how the wrath is to be defined or described, he characterizes it in terms of people's experience of alienation from God. In other words, wrath is a relational term, denoting that lack of relationship with God which is his judgement on those who reject his love

Most interpreters of Paul would agree with Howard Marshall, that 'Paul's vocabulary expresses the results of Christ's death rather than its character, and this fits in with New Testament thought in general, which is more concerned with the nature of salvation than the precise way in which it has been achieved'.' Yet the history of exegesis and of dogmatic theology is laden with attempts to explain in detail the rationale of how the work of Christ achieved salvation. And one mode of understanding Christ's work, the doctrine of penal substitution, relies particularly on a retributive understanding of divine judgement and speaks of 'Christ bearing our punishment'

But we can observe that in his citation of Deuteronomy 21:23 Paul alters 'accursed by God' to 'cursed' (epikataratos). Is this because he wants to put a certain distance between Christ's experience of forsakenness and the thought that this is specifically inflicted by God? I think it possible that Paul is sensitive here to the danger of giving the impression that at the cross God (the Father) is hostile to Jesus - just as Calvin, in his finely balanced discussion, includes the comment that 'we do not suggest that God was ever inimical or angry toward him. How could he be angry toward his beloved Son, "in whom his heart reposed"?

Conclusions I have argued that Paul's understanding of the death of Christ includes, but does not place at the centre, the idea that he bore the retributive punishment for our sins which otherwise would have to be inflicted on us. To understand the atonement exclusively in those terms involves a misunderstanding of what Paul means by 'the wrath of God'. It is to press too far the implications of his legal metaphor. In some presentations at least, it risks driving a wedge between the action of God and that of Jesus. 61 for our me such who died ; cf. Rom s found in have died! (Rom. 5:9) Christ' (Gal Rather than saying that in his death Christ experienced retributive punishment on behalf of humanity, Paul more often says that he entered into and bore on our behalf the destructive consequences of sin. Standing where we stand, he bore the consequences of our alienation from God. In so doing he absorbed and exhausted them, so that they should not fall on us. It is both true and important to say that he 'was judged in our place' - that he experienced divine judgement on sin in the sense that he endured the God-ordained consequences of human sinfulness. But this is not the same as to say that he bore our punishment. It is a perspective on the atonement which, I believe, confirms the understanding of divine judgement for which I argued in earlier chapters: that judgement is not inflicted by God 'from outside', but is the intrinsic outworking, under God's control, of the consequences of human choices and actions, and that Paul's primary category for understanding salvation and condemnation is that of relationship or non-relationship to God. Such an approach does not regard the human condition as any less serious than approaches which rely on retributive categories. But it is concept. more in line with Paul's understanding of sin as a relational It is very striking that Paul almost always uses his normal word for the plural and at least four of these are in Old Testament quotations 'sin' (hamartia) in the singular. Of sixtytwo instances, only nine are in or are dependent on early Christian tradition (Rom. 4:7; 11:27: 1 Thes. 2:16; 1 Cor. 15:3). This is because he understands sin not as a collection of individual acts but as a relationship of hostility towards God. 2 It is that hostility, that whole mass of opposition to God, which Christ absorbed in his death. The danger with a retributive framework of thought is that it tends to regard sins as individual deeds, each requiring a corresponding penalty. The retributive doctrine is right in its insistence that forgiveness cannot take place without a cost being borne. It is no light or easy thing to forgive and to restore broken relationships. Those who forgive others take into themselves the hurt and the pain which has been caused, rather than throw it back at the offenders in retaliation. The meaning of the cross is not that God punished his Son in order to avoid punishing humanity, but that in Christ God himself took responsibility for the world's evil and absorbed its consequences into himself. Admittedly, we may sometimes speak of athletes or academics 'punishing themselves' in order to achieve some great goal, but we know we are using such language in a highly figurative way. And it would not clarify our understanding of the atonement to use such extreme imagery with reference to God. Rather may we speak of him 'absorbing the cost' of re-making our relationship with him.

The emphasis is not that God provides a way of satisfying his wrath so that sins are not counted against us, but that in Christ God deals with human sin with the result that the threat of wrath no longer hangs over us

One passage in Matthew (25:31-46) sums up most of the points we have noticed. The 'sheep' are welcomed into the kingdom which has always been God's destiny for his people (v. 34). That is what 'eternal life' (v. 46) consists of. The 'goats', on the other hand, are dismissed from the presence of the king, consigned to the 'eternal fire' prepared not for humankind but for 'the devil and his angels'. This is what 'eternal punishment' consists of. There is thus no symmetry between the kingdom of God and the place of punishment. Hell was not intended for human beings, and if people go there it is because they have identified themselves with evil and refused their true destiny offered in Christ. The essential feature of the two destinies described is being in, or being excluded from, the presence of Christ.

John's message then is that during his ministry Jesus was no apocalyptic judge such as was expected at the end of time. His purpose was the positive one of bringing salvation. But in fact his presence caused people to take sides for or against him, and so to bring judgement on themselves. And this judgement which Jesus' coming inevitably provokes is a true judgement, which the Father will accept, because 'the Father has given all judgement to the Son

People's destinies are not predetermined. But the stress on human responsibility and God's sovereignty makes clear that a person confronted by Christ must make a choice, and yet be totally dependent for salvation on the love and power of God.